Ups and downs...

So the Yankees have won nine in a row… I was trying to decide yesterday if I should play Andy Pettitte on my fantasy baseball team. But I realized that after an eight game winning streak, the Yankees were due to lose at any moment. And if I played Pettitte, it was pretty much guaranteed they would lose. That’s just the way my luck has been going lately. But if I DIDN’T play him, they might have a chance to win. And sure enough, I benched Pettitte and the Yankees won. That’s 32 points I’ll never see… but hey, I did my part to ensure a Yankee victory. And with Boston doing not-quite-as-well right now, the Yankees have managed to close the gap from 14 games to 7 and a half. They’re still in the running… and there’s a lot more baseball left to play…

But it is the middle of June already… the year is half over. We ate dinner with Rick’s parents and a couple of his sisters and nieces yesterday. And I was thinking, as the girls ran around with “summer vacation is here!” abandon, how much more slowly time seemed to pass when I was a kid. When I was young, it took EONS of time to get from the first day of school to summer vacation. And once summer vacation was here, well, that was THREE WHOLE MONTHS of freedom. In those first few weeks of sleeping in late and going to afternoon movies on a Tuesday and swimming all day and reading only books I WANTED to read, it seemed the summer would last indefinitely. And returning to school was like attending some far-off-in-the-future reunion, where I half expected students to show up with husbands and wives and kids and business cards and pictures of the new house and car – because it had been THAT long since we’d all seen each other. Three whole months.

My school memories aren’t always so great – especially high school, which seemed like four extremely slow years… years I feared would never end. I thought I’d be doomed to live an eternity in the halls of Lenape Valley, where metaphorical eagles would peck out my metaphorical liver day after day… just like poor Prometheus. (And the fact that I knew who Prometheus was certainly didn’t make my time there any more easy…) And I realize that most of the GOOD memories I have of high school revolve around singing in the chorus. Like sophomore year, when I was in the Touring Choir – the director chose 40 of us out of our 120-voice choir to travel to Toronto for a competition. After a long bus ride (which included an increasingly risqué game of truth or dare – I gratefully opted out and kept my nose semi-buried in a book…) we stopped at a Toronto high school to sing for the students there. Afterwards we ate lunch in their cafeteria, where we were mobbed like rock stars. “You guys are from the States?” one wide-eyed girl asked. She said it with such awe in her voice that I thought we must’ve been transported from the mundane locale of Toronto, Ontario, to a remote island in the Pacific – where, in fact, visitors from “the States” would be quite the rarity.

This was also the trip where I rode a roller coaster for the first time. The competition was held at a place called Canada’s Wonderland, which is a Six Flags-type amusement park. We were allowed to wander the park freely (as long as we showed up in time to sing for the judges…). I was hanging out with my high school best friend Ali, and my high school nemesis Sara. (Yes, that’s right – I had a high school nemesis. Sara was the girl I was always trying to do BETTER than. If she got an A, I wanted an A+. She was my competition-driven motivation to study more. And while I’m sure she didn’t KNOW she was my nemesis, it always annoyed me when she got a better grade than I did…) We were also hanging out with a girl named Christine, who, like me, had never ridden a roller coaster. So Ali and Sara – roller coaster connoisseurs that they were – convinced us that we needed to try one. They promised to ride one with us, so if the cars flew off the track in some bizarre roller coaster tragedy, we’d all die together. But as Christine and I nervously stood in line with only two more people in front of us, we saw that Ali and Sara were boarding the coaster without waiting for us. They smiled and waved and gave us a smart-alecky “have fun!” and left us there on the platform to reflect on our fate.

But once we were all buckled in and the ride started to move (“it was nice knowing you,” I said as we reached the top of the first drop), I suddenly realized that the roller coaster was FUN. I loved the ups and downs, I loved the turns, and I especially loved the upside-down loops. When we hopped off the ride and found our smug and amused pair of friends, we announced that we wanted to try every roller coaster in the park. And we did – we rode all of them, even one that ran through the entire ride backwards.

I think it’s funny when people compare life to a “roller coaster” because it’s full of “ups and downs.” Because on a roller coaster, the “downs” are just as much fun as the “ups” – not so in real life. So really, life is nothing like a roller coaster. It’s more like… oh, I don’t know… like eating ice cream really fast. Sure, the ice cream tastes great, but it’s interspersed with moments of horrible brain freeze… and that’s no fun at all. No, life is definitely not like a roller coaster… it’s like downing a pint of Ben and Jerry’s in ten minutes… So hopefully the second half of 2007 will be more like roller coasters and ice cream and less like brain freeze. And that, of course, includes the Yankees and their (soon-to-be) amazing turn-around in their fight for the playoffs…